While I am grateful for tex’s ardent and closely reasoned defense of my views, I’d like to make a few more points about the issues Justin Logan raises here. After graciously complimenting Antiwar.com as a useful educational tool, he takes up the cudgels on behalf of the Yushchenko Mythos:
“I was really astounded to see how quickly (and how viciously) the hounds were released on the good guy in what seemed to me to be a pretty clear cut dichotomy. First off, there was no “war” involved in Ukraine to be ‘anti.’ It was an astonishing, nonviolent transfer of power in which no Americans (and no Ukrainians!) were harmed.
“Second, the leaping to the defense of a pretty despicable despot, Yanukovych, the trickery about the ‘Helsinki’ human rights organization that isn’t, the neocon conspiracy schtick, all that was just bizarre, and seemed reactionary and perplexing. I have no idea why antiwar.com would so viciously attack Yushchenko, a man who was, by any account, vastly preferable to his counterpart, up to and including his pledge to remove Ukrainian troops from the quagmire in Iraq.”
“In what could have been a fruitful debate about how (or, I would submit, whether at all) U.S. taxpayer funds should be used in foreign elections and the perils and undesirability of NATO expansion, antiwar.com decided to actually take sides on behalf of a truly sleazy Soviet-style thug. I was just shocked, I guess.”
But this was a debate about NATO and the desirability of NATO expansion — to say nothing of EU expansion — and I can only express my own perplexity that Justin Logan is perplexed. He may find this shocking, but there are no “good guys” of any consequence in Ukrainian politics — and I believe the recent appointment of Yulia Timoshenko, the “gas princess” oligarch, as Prime Minister confirms my analysis.
Timoshenko is a rabid nationalist and has openly declared her eagerness to “export” the “orange revolution” to the gates of Moscow: anti-Russian sentiment was a large factor in Yushchenko’s popular appeal. This radical wing of the Yushchenko movement, added to the volatile issue of NATO membership for Ukraine, is the perfect set-up for a looming confrontation between Putin and the West.
The irony here is that the very “crimes” of which Putin stands accused are being hailed in the West when they are enacted as “reforms” in Ukraine: Yushchenko, and especially his new Prime Minister, have vowed to revisit the privatizations that enriched their political enemies — yet this very same sort of behavior, when carried out against Yukos and the Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, is condemned out of hand by the guardians of the “free market” in the West. Why the double standard?
It is completely false to say that we “leapt to the defense of Yanukovych.” Antiwar.com did no such thing. We did not and do not support him, or any other candidate or party in Ukraine, but merely confined ourselves to pointing out that U.S. support for Yushchenko was a provocation aimed at provoking a new cold war. Since many of Yushchenko’s most vocal supporters were making the same point — and claiming that a new cold war would be a good thing — this hardly seems controversial.
It is odd that Logan is so astounded by the peaceful transfer of power in Ukraine: after all, Communist regimes were overthrown in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and throughout the former Soviet Union, with hardly a shot being fired.
Congressman Ron Paul has showed how the United States intervened in Ukraine by subsidizing and otherwise giving full political support to Yushchenko. If it is “reactionary” to oppose this, and to take with a very large grain of salt the administration’s alleged interest in promoting “democracy” worldwide, then I plead guilty. Seen in the context of the U.S. government’s overall foreign policy of military aggression rationalized by “democratic” rhetoric, the Euro-American incursion into Ukraine strikes an ominous note.
As for “debating” the idea of U.S. government-subsidized “liberation” movements, I frankly have no interest in doing so. Since it involves an expenditure of tax dollars on an activity that is neither permitted by the Constitution nor indicated by any rule of common sense, this is a settled question insofar as libertarians are concerned. It seems to me that the same people who attack central planning in the realm of domestic policy could not fail to raise the same objection when it comes to foreign affairs. Apart from the issue of consistency, however, there’s a practical matter to attend to: if you’re planning on taking away people’s social security benefits, and at the same time trying to convince them that foreigners need more money so they can learn all about “democracy” and “freedom,” then I think you’ve got a pretty hard sell on your hands.
It was not clear to me what Logan and Chris Preble would consider a credible threat emerging from Iraq. If we mean by that a threat to the continental United States, it is hard to imagine what circumstances might justify a re-invasion. It also seems to me that Logan is unthinkingly adopting and applying the Bushian doctrine of preemptive warfare. This administration claims the right to attack and invade any nation before it becomes a threat — and Logan accepts this, only qualifying it to the extent such a policy requires that “our rulers need to do a much better job observing empirical reality.” But the empirical reality, as we have seen in Iraq, is that this doctrine leads to disaster — and it isn’t just an “empirical” question. It is also an ideological and moral question, as far as libertarians are concerned, that boils down to this: does the United States have the right to commit mass murder in every nation on earth in the illusory pursuit of its alleged “national security”?
Our answer must be an emphatic no, and this moral and political stance must inform our subsequent empirical analysis. As long as we get this straight, libertarians can learn to apply their principles without forgetting them.